Krischanda (Krissy) Bemister

Krischanda (Krissy) Bemister is a SSHRC Vanier funded PhD student in the Psychology program at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). Krissy received her BA and MA in Psychology from TMU, and has worked in research labs at TMU, UofT, and OISE. During her professional and academic career, Krissy has travelled throughout Ontario to investigate ways to enhance educational outcomes for children with learning difficulties; she has also led community-engaged projects to promote equity in learning and care for children in marginalized communities; and studied how group membership plays a role in social judgments. Krissy is also an advocate for causes close to her heart, such as animal rights, mental health awareness and racial justice. In 2022, Krissy was awarded a Mitacs Accelerate research grant; using a participatory qualitative methodology, she investigated the impact of compassion fatigue on Toronto Zoo staff that care for sick, injured, or dying animals. Krissy aims to utilize her knowledge, lived experiences, and research to improve the lives of those without a voice.

Exposure to mostly own-race faces during the first year of life leads to perceptual consequences for babies, such as a reduced ability to distinguish “other-race”, compared to “own-race”, faces (i.e., the other-race effect; Kelly et al., 2007). There are demonstrated perceptual consequences to this phenomenon – one study demonstrated that infants were more likely to rely on own-race versus other-race adults’ eye gaze cues under conditions of uncertainty (Xiao et al., 2018). But does the other-race effect in infancy lead to differences in learning from own-race (i.e., in-group) compared to other-race (i.e., out-group) adults in childhood? Further, what credibility cues may impact this process? We know that beginning around the age of 4, children start to reason about how an adult’s history of accuracy relates to their overall reliability, preferring to learn from reliable over unreliable adults (Koenig & Harris, 2005; Barth et al., 2014; Pasquini et al., 2007), and also start to discern how well a speaker’s confidence correlates or conflicts with their accuracy (Brosseau-Liard, Cassels & Birch, 2014). Children younger than 4, on the other hand, tend to trust information from in-group over out-group adults (Elashi & Mills, 2014) and reject information from those who have made at least one error in the past (Pasquini et al., 2007) – particularly if another adult provides conflicting information (Vanderbilt et al., 2014). They also trust adults who display verbal cues of confidence (i.e., “I know”) over cues of hesitance (i.e., “I think”) (Jaswal & Malone, 2007; Birch, Severson & Baimel, 2020). No research has investigated how adults’ accuracy and group membership (i.e., in-group vs. out-group) interact to predict young children’s likelihood of learning from them, or the role that speaker confidence may play in this relationship. Researchers have studied the specific mechanisms underlying the development of the other-race effect in infancy (Markant et al., 2015) and have investigated the developmental trajectory of how children reason about credibility (Brosseau-Liard, Cassels & Birch, 2014; Birch, Severson & Baimel, 2020). Less research has investigated the downstream consequences of the other-race effect and no research has investigated how racial identity, accuracy, and confidence intersect to influence children’s learning from adults. 

My research asks: How may an adult's race, degree of confidence, and choice accuracy impact young children’s learning? If cues to confidence can mitigate or eliminate the potential bias present when children learn from those that differ in ethnic identity and/or accuracy, this could indicate that they are capable of reasoning about, and weighing, subjective and objective cues to credibility. Investigating the downstream consequences of the other-race effect and understanding the various ways that it may play a role in young children’s learning, is critically important to understand – and potentially intervene in – the early emergence of racial biases. Mobilizing these findings within and beyond academia could serve to inform future studies, teaching pedagogy, and classroom practices.